History for the day

Union and Confederate troops met in a bloody, twenty-hour clash near Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia on 12 May 1864. The nightmarish fighting, which took place at close quarters during a rain storm in ankle-deep mud, ended in a stalemate at breastworks later dubbed the Bloody Angle. Fighting continued sporadically for the next week, until Union General Ulysses S. Grant withdrew to attempt to circumvent Confederate General Robert E. Lee's army to the south, leaving behind eighteen thousand casualties to the Confederates' twelve thousand.